Notes from Barbara Duden's Disembodying Women (1993)

short bluesky summary
 
Duden is interested in three things: how it feels to live in a body; how it FELT to live in a body, historically; & the contemporary scientific apparatus that delegitimates these perceptual forms of (self-)knowledge
 
put another way: today, a pregnant person "knows" (or rather is told) that they are pregnant because a perceiving machine "sees" it. the machine is an extension of a medical, social, & legal system and its function is to make the pregnant person (& the unborn life) visible/legible within that system
 
for Duden, it is wrong to see either the machine or the system as natural or inevitable. they can be historicized—which allows us to analyze how they serve ideology (and function as power) and to interrogate whether they have the pregnant person's best interests at heart (spoiler: Duden thinks "no")
 
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